Exercise 2

Articles Exercise from Memoirs of A Parrot

Can you add articles (a/an/the) where necessary in the following text?

After doing the exercise, click on the link at the bottom of the page to view the passage with correct articles inserted, together with an explanation of their use.

Compare your answers to the following correct text:(you can click the underlined words for explanations)

Ms Parrot,
the
most famous lady detective of
the
twenty-first century, was born in
the
United Kingdom in
the
1960s. Since then, she has been to many countries, including
Portugal, Singapore and Australia,
and has lived in
the
northern hemisphere and
the
southern hemisphere, as well as on
the
equator. She has never been to
the
Philippines or
the
United States, but she speaks
English, French and Portuguese.
Like Sherlock Holmes,
the
Sherlock Holmes,
the
famous detective, she plays
the
violin, and sometimes practises up to five times
a
day. She is also
the
only person in
the
world to have performed Tchaikovsky's 1812
overture
in one
breath
on
the
recorder.

She has been
a
detective for
thirty years
and claims that although
many people
think that being
a
detective is
a
piece of cake,
detectives
generally work very hard and it's not all
fun
and
games.

A
detective is someone who solves
mysteries,
and
the
people who contact Ms Parrot have some very unusual
problems.Little information
is available about some of
the
cases she has solved, but
a
few of
her
most famous cases have attracted worldwide
attention
and she has been offered up to
a
thousand dollars
an
hour to help solve
mysteries
such as
the
case of
an
Australian owl in
a
uniform.
The
bird laid
an
egg in
a
European nest in less than
an
hour after
its arrival.
What
a
strange problem!

With great
modesty,
she has either declined such
a
fee or donated
the
money to
the
poor, or to
the
Grammar Survival Fund, believing that
the
detective should use
their
skills for
the
common good.